Here are some of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright quotes.


Old as man's mortal life is this urge to grow. - Frank Lloyd Wright

A doctor can bury his mistakes but and architect can only advise his client to plant vines. - Frank Lloyd Wright

A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward. - Frank Lloyd Wright, American Architect

An idea is salvation by imagination - Frank Lloyd Wright

Early in my career I was a very arrogant yound man.. I was so sure of my ground and my star that I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility... and I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry. - Frank Lloyd Wright

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. - Frank Lloyd Wright

I had no choice, Olgivanna. I was under oath. - Frank Lloyd Wright, immediately after a court appearance when he was asked his "occupation" and answered saying he was "the worlds greatest architect" - Oligvanna his wife was present in the courthouse and chided him on the answer.

Noble life demands a nuble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignooble civilization and therefore imminent downfall. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The only thing wrong with architecture are the architects. - Frank Lloyd Wright

An expert is a man who has stopped thinking - he knows! - Frank Lloyd Wright

I feel coming on me a strange disease - humility. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Freedom is from within. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism . . . but only through the direct responsibility of the individual. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. - Frank Lloyd Wright

I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anarchronism, almost the equivalent of smoking. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Television is bubble-gum for the mind. - Frank Lloyd Wright (This one has also been recorded as "Television is bubble-gum for the eyes")

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. - Frank Lloyd Wright

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. - Frank Lloyd Wright Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. - Frank Lloyd Wright

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Don't eat it. It will kill you before your time. Avoid it. - Frank Lloyd Wright, on the subject of "pepper"

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. - Frank Lloyd Wright

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The room within is the great fact about the building. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Every great architect is -- necessarily -- a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The architect must be a prophet . . . a prophet in the true sense of the term . . . if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect. - Frank Lloyd Wright

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The following quote could perhaps been woven into an introduction to Star
Trek : Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The space within becomes the reality of the building. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Space is the breath of art - Frank Lloyd Wright

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented - Frank Lloyd Wright

All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account" (said after he returned from a South American trip with fellow architect Saarinen) - Frank Lloyd Wright

Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it. - about fellow architect Le Corbusier - Frank Lloyd Wright

He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head. - (about un-named well known architect of his day) - Frank Lloyd Wright

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. - Frank Lloyd Wright

We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally - Frank Lloyd Wright

A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality. - Frank Lloyd Wright

I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The one on my board right now - What Frank Lloyd Wright said when asked which of his buildings was the most beautiful

Move the table - Wright's response to a client who phoned him to complain of rain leaking through the roof of the house onto the dining table. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Abandon it. -- Frank Lloyd Wright, on being asked how he would go about improving Pittsburgh

Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances. - Frank Lloyd Wright

An expert is a man who has stopped thinking-he knows! - Frank Lloyd Wright

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change. - Frank Lloyd Wright

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other. -- Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 1932

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived -- Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture, 1970

A doctor can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. -- Frank Lloyd Wright, New york Times Magazine, October 4, 1953

If you foolishly ignore beauty, you'll soon find yourself without it. Your life will be improverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. -- Frank Lloyd Wright, New york Times Magazine, October 4, 1953

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it. - Frank Lloyd Wright

My building will last at least 300 years. - Frank Lloyd Wright

If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!" - Frank Lloyd Wright when questioned about the low ceilings in the Guggenheim Museum.

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality." – Frank Lloyd Wright on skyscrapers.

Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part. - Frank Lloyd Wright

He was too good for the job." – Frank Lloyd Wright when asked why he didn't vote for a particular presidential candidate.

The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Again in America we erect temples but this time not so much to the mystery of great terrestrial or cosmic forces as to the interior or spirit-power of manhood as released by American democracy and its sciences. - Frank Lloyd Wright

I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. - Frank Lloyd Wright

No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other. Continuity, plasticity, and all the new simplicity the imply have at last come home. - Frank Lloyd Wright

...The next one." – Frank Lloyd Wright when asked which was his favorite project.

It is a terrific thing to get a building built that has the qualities of greatness in it. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. - Frank Lloyd Wright